Institutional Selectivity and Good Practices in Undergraduate Education: How Strong is the Link?

By Ernest T. Pascarella, Ty M. Cruce, Paul D. Umbach, Gregory C. Wolniak, George D. Kuh, R. Carini, John C. Hayek, Robert M. Gonyea, Chun-Mei Zhao. 2006

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Academic selectivity plays a dominant role in the public's understanding of what constitutes institutional excellence or quality in undergraduate education. In this study, we analyzed two independent data sets to estimate the net effect of three measures of college selectivity on dimensions of documented good practices in undergraduate education. With statistical controls in place for important confounding influences, an institution's median student SAT/ACT score, a nearly identical proxy for that score, and the Barron's Selectivity Score explained from less than 0.1% to 20% of the between-institution variance and from less than 0.1% to 2.7% of the total variance in good practices. The implications of these findings for what constitutes quality in undergraduate education, college choice decisions, and the validity of national college rankings are discussed.

Subfields: Education, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b19aae124f667ded475319504bc097ed8ff56f51

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of First-Year Seminars on College Students’ Life-long Learning Orientations (2013, methodology): “Two complementary surveys—the NSSE student survey and the WNS Student Experiences—were simultaneously administered to measure college experiences, student engagement, and exposure to vetted good practices (see Pascarella et al., 2006; Pascarella, Wolniak, Cruce, & Blaich, 2004).”
Exploring the Engineering Student Experience: Findings from the Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES) (2010, background): “Institutional Selectivity We view institutional selectivity as “a measure of the role of peers and interactions with other students in understanding the educational impact of the institution” (Pascarella et al., 2006).”
First-Generation Undergraduate Students and the Impacts of the First Year of College: Additional Evidence (2012, background): “Researchers incorporating the good practices within a conceptual framework have measured the frequencies in which undergraduates are exposed to the good practices and their effects across various college outcomes (Cruce, Wolniak, Seifert, & Pascarella, 2006; Kuh, Pace, & Vesper, 1997; Kuh & Vesper, ”
What Student Affairs Professionals Need to Know About Student Engagement (2009, unknown): “Scores of articles, chapters, books, and reports have generated a treasure trove of insights into how and why engagement is important to a high quality undergraduate experience in the first decade of the twenty-first century (e.g., Astin & Sax, 1998; Carini, Kuh, & Klein, 2006; Community College Sur”
How Effective are the NSSE Benchmarks in Predicting Important Educational Outcomes? (2010, background): “The NSSE benchmark scales were designed specifically to measure these effective academic and non-academic experiences, and there is little evidence that such experiences are substantially linked to the academic selectivity of the college one attends (Pascarella et al., 2006).”
The Construct Validity of Student Engagement: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis Approach (2009, background): “This study’s factor decomposition was fairly consistent with other recent research using NSSE data that identifies the need to further isolate components beyond the five benchmarks (i.e., Pascarella et al. 2006; Gordon et al. 2008; LaNasa et al. 2007a).”